Back to my mother: Beyond the comedy of Alexandra Lam, the true drama of the Boomerang generation

You certainly remember the comedy Tanguy, directed by Etienne Chateles and released in 2001. .

The film has also become so iconic that its title – and by extension the first name – has even entered everyday language, precisely to characterize a young man who takes longer than average to leave the family cocoon.

More than ten years after that “The Tanguy Generation”We talked “The Boomerang Generation”That’s the subject of Back to My Mother, a comedy written by Eric LaVine, directed by Alexandra Lam and Jossian Balasco tonight on TF1.

The director got the idea for the film released in 2016 after watching a TV report on the subject. what are we talking about The term actually refers to teenagers who are forced to move back in with their parents due to job loss.

“Boomerang” generation

This concept was actually born in 2005, coined by a Canadian sociologist named Barbara Mitchell, who then talked about “boomerang babies” after discovering that 40% of young Americans returned to their parents. in 2009, The BBC devoted an article to this topic111,000 people between the ages of 16 and 29 were forced to move back in with their parents after the 2008 crisis.

If no Go back to my mother prefers to mine the comic vein, the reality is far less funny… according to a study published in 2015 Abbé Pierre Foundation, entitled “The Hidden Face of Tanguy“, Of the 4.5 million adults living with their parents in 2013, 925,000 lived alone before moving back into their family.

Half of these people lived in independent accommodation for more than three months before returning to their family home, two-thirds of them for more than a year. The number of people aged 25 and over in this situation increased by 20% between 2002 and 2013, from 282,000 to 339,000.

The phenomenon is far from only French, but international. “In recent years, this phenomenon has become even stronger in Great Britain, France, Spain, as well as in the United States or Japan.” Sociologist Sandra Gavria of Le Havre University explained in an article published in 2016 in the journal. SociologySunder the name “The Boomerang Generation: Becoming an Adult in a Different Way”. “Here’s how, between 1950 and 2003, the return rate in the UK rose from 25% to 46%. he wrote.

A phenomenon that has grown with the pandemic

Uncertainty, the difficulty of finding a job, the explosion of rent prices… and now the devastating impact of the pandemic associated with Covid-19: there is no shortage of arguments to explain this phenomenon, which has not stopped since then. growing.

According to Figures provided by DREES in June 2020 (Department of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics), which depends on the Ministry of Health, this return often occurs at the end of studies or to find a job (26%), during studies (24%) or after separation. or death (20%).

Although students are the most numerous (42% of adults live with their parents), 58% no longer live with their parents. Almost a third are employed, and 19% are unemployed. Add to that that 60% of them have a bachelor’s degree or higher. In addition to this population category, there are 3.8 million other adults who never leave the family cocoon, often for financial reasons.